Transmogratification and 4.3 Raidin

Transmogrification (or gratification as I’m calling it) is the whole reason I came back to WoW.  I’ve spent more time getting things ready for this feature than getting ready for raids.  It’s just literally the best feature in game right now.

My main, the lovely Xeonio, is currently sporting a wondrous tier 5 priest and is wielding some cotton candy from Hyjal I think is where it’s from.  I’ve always been a huge fan of the Avatar set and getting to wear it again makes me happy.

It’s super popular though and I’ve been seeing lots of priests with it on.  I’ll probably be changing sometime soon.  I’m going to be running lots of old world raids to help peeps with gear so I might get my tier 1 or go with the mage recolored Tirisfal set.

Sooooo many options.

My rogue on the other hand has been pretty easy to get a look for.

Her bank was FILLED with daggers and weapons to transmo’ when it came out.  I wanted really badly to wear torturing pokers as her daggers but they don’t really seem to go with her current outfit.  I think they might be too low res for her current armor set (which isn’t complete).

She’s wearing a recolored version of t10 but her chest isn’t the right color so it looks a bit out of place.  I just need 300 more JP to get the right chest piece.  Her feet are still wrong as well cuz I have to find a stupid crafter to make them.

I settled on dissectors for this tier of gear just ‘cuz I love the sleekness of the weapon.  It’s always been a favorite of mine.

Did you know that since they took Edwin Vancleef out of the game you can’t get the defias chest piece?

Yea.  It’s not possible to make the defias set now unless you are horde (they have a quest that gives you a look a like) or had it prior to his removal.  That’s a set I could pair the pokers with.

“The transmo room needs better lightning.”  - Daemia

That’s enough transmogratification for now.  On to the rest of 4.3!

Raiding:

Dragon Soul I’d have to say has been disappointing so far.  I know it’s not supposed to be back breaking but clearing the first 4 bosses on normal mode in our first night seems a bit meh.

Maybe it’s an Icecrown redux?

You mow through the first half of the instance and then spend the next few months trying to kill the 5th boss.  Ultraxion didn’t seem all that difficult though.  We did a test pull since we ran out of time and the mechanics seemed pretty simple.

The first boss, Morcock, could be killed by a bunch of brain dead monkeys.  A crystal spawns and the 3 closest people (on 10man) get a beam.  They run and stand by the crystal.  It explodes, you heal, super simple.  He also does an AE stomp and the damage is split between everyone within 15yds(?) I think.  It wasn’t significant.  He also spawns some spikes you run and stand behind to avoid black blood.

SILLY EASY.

There’s two bosses you can choose between for the second boss.  We chose Warlord Zonads.

He was the hardest boss of the evening.  He spawns an orb that goes for the wall.  Your ranged stand in front of it and it’ll explode and bounce off them, heading back for the boss.  It has to explode and bounce off the melee to go back to ranged.  Very ping pong.

Each time the ball explodes the damage is split between the people near it and it gets an extra stack to do more damage.  We were doing it to stacks of 5.  Then you want all the melee to move the fuck outta the way and let it hit him.  It puts a debuff on him that increases damage done and sticks around.  The raid clumps up on him because the healing gets rough.  Otherwise it’s just a burn phase.

That’s both of his phases and you just rotate between them.  Pretty easy.  We used 1 tank.

Yor’sahj the Unsleeping, I was pretty sure he was going to be difficult but he’s not.  He’ll spawn 3 oozes of different colors.  You kill 1 of the three and the other two will give him a buff.  Just setup a priority on killing them (purple > green > yellow > black is what we went with).  Purple is just bad shit.  Green makes the raid spread out (but red / yellow make you collapse in so you can see why this would be bad).

We 1 tank’d this fight as well and it’s WAY easier than you’ll expect it to be.

Hag of the Storm is a completely mechanic driven fight.  Two phases.

Frost phase you run around the outside of the room killing some crystals and not getting hit by the frost spikes that travel clockwise or the ice that falls to the ground.

Lightning phase you kill an add then form a conga line to transfer lightning around the room to each flux capacitor.

Those phases rotate until she’s dead.  It helps to mark where the flux capacitors spawn and then setup groups accordingly so everyone knows where to run.  It takes 3 between a capacitor on 10man to arc it to each one.

There’s the first 4 bosses in a nutshell.

If you dumb that down significantly… like… A LOT… you have the LFR.  You just have to try it out to find out how sad it is.

This post is already silly long so I’ll wrap it up here and talk about class changes later and probably have a new look for Xeonio!

Tagra’s Tactics pt.1 – Know Your Class

Quite some time ago I had asked Tagra for a guest post (cuz she’s long winded).  She certainly didn’t disappoint and provided me with an enormous post that scared me.  I’m going to be breaking it down into smaller sections.  Yes, it’s about WoW… I still read up on WoW =p

Xeo wants a “Do’s and Don’ts of Raiding” post, and apparently I have sufficiently fooled him into thinking I am qualified to write one. This is an excellent opportunity to bitch about things that annoy me, but I’ll try to talk about useful things too.

Profanity warning. I curse sometimes. A little.

You are in a raid, gosh what should you do??!

Know your Class.
Yeah I know, that’s kind of “durr really?” but there are a shocking number of people who don’t actually know the capabilities of their class. You might even be raiding with them right now. It’s not entirely their fault, though. Knowing your class is actually far more involved than levelling to 80 would have you believe.

The in game interface teaches you roughly fuck-all about what your class should be doing in a raid, or what your capabilities actually are. As a tank you have no idea what your HP should be, other than “not 0″, nevermind the fact that there is a defense cap. As a healer you have no idea if you should be getting spellpower gems, haste gems, crit gems!??!? As a DPS you don’t even get (non-addon) in game feedback about how much overall damage output you’re actually doing, much less how much you should be doing, and how to do it. The game proudly tells us we have “8%” increased chance to hit bosses, and we go “sweet, I’m hit capped.” and actively avoid getting any more hit rating. Why doesn’t it fucking say 100% chance to hit? We know it’s 100% because someone sat at a target dummy and calculated it, then posted about it on the internet.

It’s unfortunate, but learning how to maximize the capability of your class requires hunting down people who do things like that and finding out what they have learned, because the interface doesn’t tell us useful things all the time.

Here’s the caveat though.

Beware the “cookie-cutter”. You probably won’t actually go wrong with the cookie-cutter build of the week, because it’s cookie-cutter for a reason, right? But it annoys me to see people go cookie-cutter without understanding why it is the cookie-cutter build.
This is very important, in my opinion, because next week when the patch comes out and they go “oh by the way we just changed all your core class abilities”, the ones who went cookie-cutter simply because it’s cookie-cutter are left lost and confused, mashing the same buttons and wondering what happened. Those who understand why their build is the way it is are able to understand the change, adjust rotations or specs immediately and continue to do their best… and then post the new improved cookie-cutter so that everyone else can catch up.

Look at the talents and rotation you use and try to understand why it is that way, and if it makes sense to have it that way. That alone makes you a better player.

Tomorrow… Tagra’s Tactics pt.2

Death of 25man?

Yesterday I talked about the two most recent announcements and how it would effect your free time.  Today I want to talk about a different aspect of the game it will effect and hit mainly on the first announcement that is putting the 10 and 25 man raids on one lockout.

Should I be angry about a change to a game I don’t play?  Sure, why not.

I’m not actually angry, just sad.  I think this change is a huge detriment to the community that they try to promote.

At the moment the reason to run 25 man is because the loot is superior.  You have a lot of groups that struggle in 25 man raids because they are PUG’ing 5-15 people.  They do this struggle because they know its where the good loot lives.  If they could drop those PUGs allowing them to run a decent group for the same loot they would happily do that.

I think we’ll see a HUGE decline in the number of 25 man raids that are being run.  Raid leading is stressful, if you can ease that stress by 150% without really losing anything… then its a huge boon.

You’ll still see the uber 25 man groups I think.  There is more prestige to do it with 25 than 10 of course but there’s no reason to struggle on 25 man for less than you could do in a more competent 10 man.

You’ll see a lot of really horrible 25 man groups as well.  They’ll be recruiting in trade chat (/point Marisse) and forming groups to go do things you wouldn’t have imagined.  Except now those groups aren’t going to be mains that missed out on their 25 man for the week… they are going to be semi geared alts trying to figure out why they get aggro when they death grip the mob.

My estimation is that you’ll see 60% less 25 man raids than there are right now.  Even if the difficulty level is similar… 10 people management is soooooooooooooooooo much easier than 25 people wrangling.

Once you take into account the fact that your character is cap’d on the number of points you can earn in a week you realize you have another reason to go with a group that is better and more likely to get the job done.

Why struggle with 25 when you can rape with 10?

Failure is not an option.

I’m not sure when this revelation came about, maybe I’m trying to prove something to myself, but failure is something I’ve never taken very well.  Hell, I don’t even like to be 2nd best.  To me, fun is winning.

Because of this desire to not fail I’ve always been in some form of a leadership role.  I’m always willing to learn and do whatever it takes to get to first place.  If I’m not leading, then I’m mentoring or learning.  Being first is an insatiable appetite that never ends.

It’s also why I take failing so badly.  When my raid group fails… I fail.  What did I miss that could have kept us alive?  Did I assign DPS incorrectly?  Was the healing targets wrong?  Should I have put one more person on picking up adds?

Random Update #17

It has been super hectic for my IRL lately.  Being an adult sucks!

I found a house though.  We had to play a game of HAGGLE! to get a price but it was finally agreed upon.  I’m under contract now and my home inspection was just done this Tuesday.  There’s nothing major wrong, thank God, but a buncha minor things.  The house is 70 yrs old after all so it needs a bit of TLC.  My realtor (who isn’t quite the brightest crayon in the box) is supposed to get a list together and say, ‘NO EXCUSES!  FIX IT!’  We’ll see how well that goes over Monday.

The company I work for is opening a new store about an hour and a 1/2 away from where we are and one of my employees is going to be taking it over.  She’s been with the company for two years.  I’m having to train her in the stupid store manager stuff (ie. bullshit paperwork) that has to get done.  Going over the hiring and terminating and just the general things you don’t know when you first become a manager.  Hope I don’t forget anything!  Any suggestions from you all?

On top of that she’s is was a full time employee for me so now I’ll have to hirer 2 part time peeps to replace her.  It’s been good other then that though.  I’ve had a stable crew for almost 10 months which is a record for me.  My turn over is usually higher (like 1 employee every 2-3 months).  I can’t help it if I’m hard to work for.

All this busy has led to a change in our raid scheduling as well.  For those that don’t know I solo run my raids (with the help of 24 VERY talented people who know their jobs and get them done exceedingly well… except when they’re tired and RUN THROUGH FUCKING GREEN CLOUDS OMFG!).  Since I solo lead it means that if I’m not there… then there’s no raid.  I’ve cut out Sunday t7.5 clearings (we were doing Naxx25 / OS25 +2 / Malygos25 in a little under 3 hrs /strut).  We are dropping our Ulduar25 Thursday’s and moving it to after ToC25 normal on Fridays.  Since we are lacking the DPS to push through the Northrend Beasts encounter on hard we’re just gonna keep farming Ulduar for some minor upgrades and the ToC25 normal.  This puts us at a minimalist raiding schedule of Friday night and Saturday afternoon for 25mans.  I’m leading a ToC10man on Tuesdays and we have two other raid leads leading ToC10 on Saturday evenings.

My fun new priesty alt is also up to 22.  I took a screenshot at 20 in Redridge and realized that they are all going to basically look the same cuz of the stupid heirloom armor /sigh.  Anyway, here he is in his new found mount glory!  Whoever thought of reducing the mount levels… I fucking love you.

I really love the painted horses to.  They have always been my favorite horse both in game and IRL.  If you’ve never ridden a horse before you should try it at least once.  It really is a great experience.  Stroll through some lightly wooded areas or grab a lance and chase little kids around, ha ha ha so much fun.

Anyway, my posting my be a bit erratic for a bit and I’m certainly going to try and keep it from being so long between posts.  Sharing my thoughts with you all and getting your feedback is tons of fun.  /hug